Forbes columnist Steven Salzberg and author-investigator Joe Nickell will each be awarded the 2012 Robert P. Balles Prize in Critical Thinking, to be presented by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry at the CFI Summit in October.

Enfield Poltergeist

In August 1977, a series of disturbances that were soon characterized as a case of poltergeist phenomena or even demonic possession began in Enfield, a
northern suburb of London. The subject of a forthcoming movie, the occurrences, including the actions of an eleven-year-old girl who repeatedly “levitated”
above her bed, “held the nation spellbound” for over a year, according to Britain’s Daily Mail; “no explanation other than the paranormal has ever been
convincingly put forward” (Brennan 2011).

Suspicious Acts

The events began on August 30 in the Enfield home of Margaret Hodgson. The divorced Hodgson lived there with her four children—Peggy, thirteen; Janet,
eleven; Johnny, ten; and Billy, seven—whose names, in early accounts, were fictionalized. Two of the children, Janet and Johnny, attempted to convince
their mother that their beds were unaccountably shaking. The next night brought mysterious knocking sounds and the sliding of a chest of drawers in the
girls’ room. There were more knockings, and soon Hodgson had a police car making a call to 284 Green Street (Playfair 1979; 1980, 12–33).

A female police constable witnessed a chair wobble and slide but could not determine the cause of the movement. By the next morning, marbles and Lego toy
pieces began to “zoom out of thin air and bounce off the walls.”

“Janet, did you throw that?” Her mother’s question began a long series of witnesses’ suspicions—or outright accusations—that Janet was the cause of the
trouble that centered on her. According to Guy Lyon Playfair—who, with colleague Maurice Grosse, observed and recorded much of the phenomena over their
course—Janet was the “main focus” or “epicentre” of incidents. “She was always near when something happened, and this in­evitably led to accusations that
she was playing tricks, although Grosse was already fully convinced that she could not be responsible for all the incidents” (Playfair 1980, 37).

Was her sister, Peggy, partly to blame? Although Janet was by far the most frequently present suspect, with disturbances even following her to school, her
older sister was also central to some events. Once, for example, when Peggy shouted, “I can’t move! Something’s holding me!” she was found on the stairs
with one leg extended behind her in a manner that could easily be explained as play-acting. She was also involved in other incidents, and when on one
occasion the girls were separated (with Peggy sent to a neighbor’s home), the antics continued at both houses; moreover, when neither girl was present—for
example when Playfair spent a night alone in the house—there were no disturbances at all (1980, 80). Were both girls playing tricks, or could the
poltergeist be in two places at once? When Janet was in the hospital for six weeks for evaluation, some incidents occurred only at home (Playfair 1980, 69,
90, 102, 263).

Still, says Playfair,

Janet was all energy, big for her age, jumping up and rushing around on the slightest pretext, and talking so fast that I had some difficulty at first in
understanding her. She had an impish look, and I could understand why some visitors to the house in the later months would suspect her of playing tricks.
(1980, 44)

Children’s Tricks

Even Playfair himself, who chronicled the events in his book This House is Haunted: The True Story of a Poltergeist (1980), had occasional doubts. After a
chest of drawers tipped and jammed at an angle against a wall, Playfair played his tape recorder and heard suspicious creaking noises, as if someone like
Janet had slipped up to the chest. “Could they have been made by her?” Playfair asked. “I was beginning to have my doubts again” (1980, 52).

There were reasons aplenty for suspicion. The poltergeist, a.k.a. “The Thing,” tended to act only when it was not being watched. Stated Grosse: “It’s
smarter than we are. Look at its timing—the moment you go out of a room something happens. You stay in the room for hours, and nothing moves. It knows what
we’re up to” (Playfair 1980, 53). Indeed, when Janet knew a camera was on, nothing occurred (1980, 53). Incredibly, Playfair and Grosse found that the
children were sometimes “motivated to add to the activity with some tricks of their own.” When members of the Society for Psychical Re­search (SPR) made
visits, the children’s trickery was the main feature of their interest, whereas, says Playfair, “it did not bother us very much. We had already seen
incidents with our own eyes that the children could not possibly have done deliberately” (1980, 70). (More on this presently.)

The incidents involving “curious whistling and barking noises coming from Janet’s general direction” suggest the extent of Playfair and Grosse’s credulity.
In time, the entity began to voice words, including obscenities, and although Playfair wondered if it were really Janet acting as “a brilliant
ventriloquist,” he did not think so. His faith in Janet continued even though “the Voice” refused to speak unless the girls were alone in the room with the
door closed (Playfair 1980, 138, 146). More­over, the credulous investigators noted that, when the growling voice occurred, “as always Janet’s lips hardly
seemed to be moving” (1980, 190).

Evidence of ventriloquial fakery was even taken as proof of authenticity! Ac­cord­ing to Playfair, “The connection between Janet and the Voice is obviously
very close. There have been several occasions when she says something it obviously meant to say, and vice versa. Would she slip up like that if she was
faking the whole thing?” (1980, 173).

Is he kidding? Even after professional ventriloquist Ray Alan visited and concluded that the girls were producing the Voice because they “obviously loved
all the attention they got,” Playfair and Grosse were not persuaded that the girls were faking. In fact, they were quick to claim that even if the girls
faked the Voice, the other mysterious happenings remained un­explained (Playfair 1980, 233).

This remained Playfair’s and Grosse’s defense even when Janet was caught at trickery (Playfair 1980, 196–7) and when Janet and Peggy confessed their
pranking to reporters. The two investigators soon elicited a retraction from the girls
(1980, 218–21). Others, such as the professional ventriloquist, were not so quick to rationalize.

Anita Gregory, who was investigating for the SPR, reported on the events in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research. She suggested that the case
had been overrated, describing several episodes of behavior on the part of Janet and Peggy that were revealing. Gregory concluded that the girls were
nonpsychically responsible for many of the incidents that were attributed to “poltergeist” phenomena. Although she thought the outbreak might have
originated paranormally (Gregory was a British parapsychologist inclined to believe in the paranormal), she concluded it had turned quickly into a farcical
performance for investigators and reporters desiring a sensational story (Gregory 1980; Clark 1981).

Even more skeptical was American magician Milbourne Christopher, who investigated briefly at the house. On one occasion, when Janet claimed she was unable
to open the bathroom door to get out, Christopher stated that he could not determine paranormal causality if he could not see an incident. Playfair writes,
“It almost seemed that the poltergeist was out to incriminate her, by producing third-rate phenomena in the presence of a first-rate observer” (1980, 170).
Another time, when Janet was sent to her room and the Voice manifested, Christopher slipped upstairs to observe. He saw Janet quietly steal out of her room
to peer down the stairs as if to make sure she was not being watched. Seeing Christopher clearly flustered her. Christopher would later conclude that the
“poltergeist” was nothing more than the antics of “a little girl who wanted to cause trouble and who was very, very, clever” (1984–85, 161).

Paranormal investigator Melvin Har­ris also weighed in on a fast photo sequence that supposedly “recorded poltergeist activity on moving film for the first
time” (Playfair 1980, 106). Harris (1980) demonstrated how the photos actually reveal the schoolgirls’ pranking. While demonologist Ed War­ren claimed that
Janet at least once was “sound asleep, levitating in midair” (Brittle 1980, 223), the photographs did not record these levitations nor did independent
witnesses see them. War­ren was notorious for exaggerating and even making up incidents in such cases, often transforming a “haunting” case into one of
“demonic possession” (Nickell 2009). Harris dubbed the pho­tographed levitations “gymnastics,” commenting, “It’s worth remembering that Janet was a school
sports champion!” (1980, 554). (See Figure 1.)

Figure 1. An eleven-year-old girl is supposedly levitating during the poltergeist outbreak of 1977–79 in Enfield, England. (Forensic illustration by Joe Nickell based on a photo in This House Is Haunted, 1980.)

History’s Verdict

By 1979, the Enfield “poltergeist” had left the Hodgson home “inexplicably,” except for an occasional isolated incident. The motivating force—we may
suspect tension in the household following the parents’ divorce—eventually ran its course. But the question re­mains: Is it true that Janet and the other
children really could not have caused certain disturbances, as Grosse and Playfair insisted? Let us look at just one instructive incident. Maurice Grosse
reported that “[the poltergeist] just threw a slipper while we were all in the room. It was not within the reach of the children, it was down near the end
of the bed” (Playfair 1980, 82).

However, all that would have been necessary would be for Janet, say, to have earlier gotten hold of the slipper and then waited for the proper moment—when
Grosse was not looking at her—to toss it. Time and again in other “poltergeist” outbreaks, witnesses have re­ported an object leaping from its resting
place supposedly on its own, when it is likely that the perpetrator had secretly ob­tained the object sometime earlier and waited for an opportunity to
fling it, even from outside the room—thus supposedly proving he or she was innocent.

As a magician experienced in the dynamics of trickery, I have carefully ex­amined Playfair’s lengthy account of the disturbances at Enfield and have
concluded that they are best explained
as children’s pranks. The principle of Occam’s razor—that the explanation requiring the fewest assumptions is the best one—well applies here. Inter­viewed
by the Lon­don Daily Mail (Brennan 2011), Janet at age forty-five (living in Essex with her husband, a retired milkman) ad­mitted that she and her sister
had faked some of the phenomena. “I’d say 2 percent,” she admitted. The evidence suggests that this figure is closer to 100 percent; however, as another
eleven-year-old girl insisted after confessing to playing poltergeist to attract attention in an earlier case: “I didn’t throw all those things. People
just imagined some of them” (Christopher 1970, 149).

Acknowledgments

Barry Karr, CSI’s executive director, tipped me to the forthcoming 2012 movie being made about this case (which I had discussed briefly in my book
Entities), and Timothy Binga, director of CFI Libraries, assisted with research.

References

Brittle, Gerald. 1980. The Demonologist: The True Story of Ed and Lorraine Warren, the World-Famous Exorcism Team. New York: St. Mar­tin’s Paperbacks.

———. 1980. This House Is Haunted: The True Story of a Poltergeist. New York: Stein and Day.

Joe Nickell

Joe Nickell, Ph.D., is Senior Research Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI) and "Investigative Files" Columnist for Skeptical Inquirer. A former stage magician, private investigator, and teacher, he is author of numerous books, including Inquest on the Shroud of Turin (1998), Pen, Ink and Evidence (2003), Unsolved History (2005) and Adventures in Paranormal Investigation (2007). He has appeared in many television documentaries and has been profiled in The New Yorker and on NBC's Today Show. His personal website is at joenickell.com.

Content copyright CSI or the respective copyright holders. Do not redistribute without obtaining permission. Thanks to the ESO for the image of the Helix Nebula, also NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team for the image of NGC 3808B (ARP 87).